Keep pulling the thread on Mark Pincus.
For the launch of a FarmVille expansion pack, Zynga sold $19 million worth of keys for early access.
Zynga's core metric for success was retention, and it was one of the only consumer companies to track day 365 retention.
Zynga developed a proprietary metric called Active Social Network (ASN) which found that a player moving from 0 to 1 ASN had an 80% chance of returning in the next month.
Zynga's Active Social Network (ASN) metric showed that if a player reached an ASN of 4, there was an 80% chance they would return 22 out of the next 30 days.
Mark Pincus recently shut down his .earth metaverse project after four years of development and $25 million in investment.
At the time of its first expansion pack, FarmVille had a daily active user base of 25 to 30 million people.
Mark Pincus's rule of thumb for founders is that their instincts are correct 95% of the time, while their ideas are wrong 75% of the time.
Sid Meier's social civilization game on Facebook was considered "dead on arrival" by Zynga product managers due to a poor first-time user experience.
Zynga's game Words with Friends became a massive hit, reaching 14 million daily active users, while the original Scrabble game did not achieve similar success on the same platform.
Mark Pincus believes Slack is a successful product that was primarily "proven and better" with little to no "new" innovation.
Rovio created 44 unsuccessful games before its 45th attempt, Angry Birds, became a major hit.
OMGpop's game Draw Something was the number one game and app in the App Store for 60 consecutive days in 2012 before the company was acquired by Zynga.